How Nan Shepherd remade my vision of the Cairngorms

Reading Nan Shepherd's masterpiece The Living Mountain changed how Robert Macfarlane saw the Cairngorms. This year he set off again, wandering and exploring the peaks in her honour
• See the audio slideshow here

How Nan Shepherd remade my vision of the Cairngorms

Reading Nan Shepherd's masterpiece The Living Mountain changed how Robert Macfarlane saw the Cairngorms. This year he set off again, wandering and exploring the peaks in her honour
• See the audio slideshow here

Friday 27 December 2013 05.00 EST
First published on Friday 27 December 2013 05.00 EST

The Cairngorms of north-east Scotland are the mountains I know best and have known longest. I have crossed the range often on foot and ski, and my maps are spidery with the ink-tracks of routes followed and summits attempted. I have seen dozens of blue-white snow hares, big as dogs, sheltering on the lee slopes of Glas Maol, and I have followed flocks of snow buntings as they created a blizzard over the high plateau. Yes, I thought I knew the Cairngorms well – until a decade or so ago when I read The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd's brief masterpiece about the region, written in the early 1940s but not published until 1977, four years before her death. Her prose – born of a lifetime's acquaintance with the massif – remade my vision of these familiar hills.

In August 2008, I wrote an article for Review in praise of The Living Mountain. At that time the book was almost out of print, but in course of my piece I hoped that "given the current surge of interest in writing about nature and place", Shepherd "might … find a new generation of readers". That hope has been realised. In 2011, Canongate republished The Living Mountain as one of the 12 founding classics of its "Canons" series, alongside books such as Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Alasdair Gray's Lanark. The Living Mountain became the surprise hit of the dozen. It has since sold 12,000 copies, and among its new admirers are Jeanette Winterson, Richard Mabey and Nicholas Lezard. Those who have valued Shepherd's work for longer include Janice Galloway, Kathleen Jamie and Ali Smith. Next spring, the Cambridge-based Galileo Publishing will put out a new edition of Shepherd's only volume of poems, In the Cairngorms, which was first published 80 years ago in a tiny print run, and has since been almost impossible to find.

In late September, I travelled to the Cairngorms to make a BBC Radio 4 programme exploring both Shepherd's prose and her landscapes. Three of us set off into the mountains. With me were Kirk Watson, a film-maker and climber from Aberdeen, and Victoria McArthur, the programme's producer. My wish was to spend days and nights in the hills without fixed purpose. Too often I had been hurried across them by weather and logistics, unable to linger and pry. Shepherd called herself "a peerer into nooks and crannies", and I took this as my mandate for aimless wandering. "Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination," she wrote, "but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him."

We walked in from the north, through the dwarf pines of the Rothiemurchus forest, under a blue sky and a daytime moon, and into the Lairig Ghru – the great glacial valley that cleaves the range into east-west halves. It was hot work for late autumn. The sun was slant but bright. Mares'-tail clouds furled at 30,000 feet (9km). A mile into the Ghru, I saw a golden eagle catch a thermal near Lurcher's Crag, "rising coil over coil in slow symmetry", as Shepherd put it. It was only the second eagle I had ever seen in the Cairngorms and it set my heart clattering.

Up the long shoulder of Sron na Lairige we toiled, over the tops of Braeriach and, at last, on to the plateau proper: a vast upland of tundra and boulder at an altitude of 4,000 feet. I heard a barking and saw to my north-east a flight of a hundred or so geese arrowing through the Lairig Ghru. Because I had height, I looked down on to their flexing backs rather than up at their steady bellies as they passed.

We made camp far across the plateau, near to the source of the River Dee – the highest origin of any British river. I pitched my tent by a stream, looking south-east over the Lairig Ghru towards the battleship flanks of Càrn a' Mhàim. Butterflies danced. There were no midges. I had some real coffee with me for the morning brew. It was, undoubtedly, the best B&B in the country.

Late that afternoon we dropped 600 feet north off the plateau in search of Loch Coire an Lochain, the "loch of the corrie of the loch", which Shepherd prized as one of the range's "recesses", or hidden places. She had also visited it on a late-September day, and marvelled at the chilly clarity of its water, and its secrecy as a site. "It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip," she wrote, "the inaccessibility of this loch is part of its power. Silence belongs to it." At the hour we reached it, a curved shadow had fallen across the corrie which, when doubled by the the surface of the water, perfectly mimicked the form of a raven's beak. We swam in the loch, which was steel-blue in colour and speckled with millions of golden pollen grains. The water was gin-clear and bitingly cold.

Sunset was close as we climbed back up to the plateau, so we waited for it on a westerly slope. As the sun lowered and reddened, cloud-wisps blew up from the valley and refracted its light to form a dazzling parhelion: concentric halos of orange, green and pink that circled the sun. Once the sun had gone, a pale mist sprang up from the plateau, and we waded knee-deep in its milk back to camp, from where we watched a yellow moon-rise above the Braeriach tors.

The air was so mild that a tent was unnecessary. I slept out; woke soaked in dew and shrouded in cloud. We were in a white world. Visibility was 20 yards at most. Robbed of sight, for a full hour I sat and listened to the mountain. Ptarmigans zithered and churred to one another, dotterels kewed, and water moved: chuckled, burred, glugged, shattered. "The sound of all this moving water is as integral to the mountain as pollen to the flower," Shepherd reflected beautifully. "One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking. But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes – the slow slap of a loch, the high clear trill of a rivulet, the roar of spate. On one short stretch of burn the ear may distinguish a dozen different notes at once."

That morning we searched in the mist for the Wells of Dee, the springs that mark the river's true birthplace. We began at the plateau rim where the Dee crashes 1,000 feet into Garbh Choire, and from there we followed it back uphill, always taking the larger branch where the stream forked. At last we reached a point where the water rose from within the rock itself. Shepherd had also made this "journey to the source", and confronted matter in its purest form: "Water, that strong white stuff, one of the four elemental mysteries, can here be seen at its origins. Like all profound mysteries, it is so simple that it frightens me. It wells from the rock, and flows away. For unnumbered years it has welled from the rock, and flowed away. It does nothing, absolutely nothing, but be itself."

This proof of the mountain's mindlessness was, to Shepherd, both exhilarating and terrifying. The Cairngorms exceeded human comprehension: what she called the "total mountain" could never totally be known. Yet if approached without expectation, the massif offered remarkable glimpses into its "being". "The mind cannot carry away all that [the mountain] has to give," she wrote near the end of her book, "nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away."

Walking under Shepherd's influence, we had enjoyed an astonishing time of gifts. The eagle, the geese, the blue‑gold loch, the parhelion, the mists, the springs … Our few days in the hills had a year's worth of marvels compressed into them – and each with its precedent in The Living Mountain. The fortuity of it all was vast, approaching the eerie. It was if we had walked into the pages of Nan's book – though, of course, her book had emerged out of the Cairngorms themselves, so we were merely completing that circuit of word and world.

Winter in the Cairngorms national park can turn positively Arctic – perfect for Kari Herbert to give her small daughter a taste of the polar conditions, and creatures, she enjoyed as a child in Greenland